Mission Gaganyaan Takes Wing

FORTY YEARS AFTER Wing Commander Rakesh Sharma flew aboard Soyuz T-11 along with two Soviet cosmonauts, four Indian astronauts are getting ready for India’s maiden human space flight mission, Gaganyaan. “This time, the timing, the countdown and the rocket belong to us,” said Prime Minister Narendra Modi, giving Group Captains Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair, Angad Pratap and Ajit Krishnan, and Wing Commander Shubhanshu Shukla astronaut wings during an event at Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre (VSSC) in Thiruvananthapuram on February 27. “These are not just four names or four people. These are four powers who will take the aspirations of 140 crore Indians to space,” the prime minister said. To be sure, there is a lot of hope riding on the Gaganyaan mission, which has been in the making since 2007, when the 600kg Space Capsule Recovery Experiment was launched and safely returned to Earth 12 days later. After long delays, the Gaganyaan mission is now targeted for 2025 and aims to launch three crew members—out of the four astronaut-designates—into a low-Earth orbit of 400km for three days and to bring them safely back by splashing down in the sea. The combined mass of the lander, ascender and propulsion mod­ules is 5,200kg. The Indian Space Research Organisation’s (ISRO) heavy-lift launch vehicle LVM3 has been reconfigured for the mis­sion and fitted with a life support system and a crew escape system in case of any serious glitches dur­ing launch or ascent. If successful, the mission will make India the fourth country to demonstrate human space flight, after the US, China, and Russia.

After Chandrayaan-3’s spec­tacular success with soft-landing near the moon’s south pole in August 2023, ISRO renewed its efforts towards the Gaganyaan mission, conducting a number of tests including, most recently, the seventh and final test of the CE20 cryogenic engine on February 21 at the ISRO Propulsion Complex in Tamil Nadu. The engine, manufactured by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited in Benga­luru, will power the upper stage of the modified LVM3 vehicle and has a thrust capability of 19 to 22 tonnes. It is the first Indian cryogenic engine to feature a gas-generator cycle. ISRO has tested other systems, such as atmospheric re-entry and space capsule recovery, and has planned about 20 precursor demon­stration and test missions, including an Integrated Air Drop Test, a Pad Abort Test, four test-abort missions—TV-D1, D2, D3 and D4—and at least two uncrewed missions—LVM3-G1 and G2—to validate every system. The first test-abort mission was performed successfully in October 2023, with the abort sequence being initiated as the rocket ascended 17km in the air. Parachutes were deployed and the crew module touched down safely in the Bay of Bengal near Sriharikota, from where it was recovered by the Indian Navy. The first uncrewed mission is scheduled for later this year and the second, which will test the life support system, will carry a humanoid robot named Vyommitra onboard instead of an animal.

The manned Gaganyaan mission, expected to be launched in late 2025, will feature an indigenously designed Environ­mental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS), which ISRO had to build after failing to procure it from other space-faring coun­tries. “We have no experience in developing an environmental control and life support system. We have only been designing rockets and satellites. We thought that this knowledge would come from other nations, but unfortu­nately, after so much discussion, nobody is willing to give it to us,” ISRO Chairman S Somanath said in December last year. The desiccated food packets they will reconstitute and con­sume on board the vehicle will be made by the Defence Research and Development Organisation’s (DRDO) Defence Food Research Laboratory (DFRL) in Mysuru. NIFT Bengaluru has designed the astronauts’ ground uniforms and they are likely to wear Russian-made Intra Vehicular Activity (IVA) suits, although ISRO has developed its own. With an allocated budget of `9,023 crore, the Gaganyaan mission has made use of the capacity ISRO has helped build in the domestic private sector over the years, with Larsen & Toubro’s Powai facility delivering some of the hardware for the launch vehicle, Chennai-based KCP Infra manufacturing the Integrated Air Drop Test Crew Module, and Tata Elxsi developing the crew module recovery model.

Dozens of pilots had enrolled to become astronauts, of whom 12 were selected for training in 2019. The four astro­nauts eventually picked for the mission are experienced Indian Air Force test pilots who were trained in space flight at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Centre in Russia and at the Astronaut Training Facility in Bengaluru. India’s space agency has shared a video of the astronauts’ training, showing them working on their mind, body and technical skills to endure the space flight. One of them is also likely to be trained by American space agency NASA. Hours after the prime minister introduced the four “Gaganauts” to the world, Malayalam actor Lena announced her marriage to Group Captain Prasanth Balakrishnan Nair. The two had tied the knot in a traditional ceremony on January 17, but kept the news under wraps to maintain the astronaut’s anonymity.

In its golden age, India’s space programme has seen consecu­tive successes following the soft landing on the moon last year. Aditya-L1, India’s first solar mission to study the sun’s outer atmosphere and chromosphere using a near-ultraviolet instru­ment, was placed in a halo orbit around the Lagrange point on January 6. ISRO also launched its first polarimetry mission, the X-ray Polarimeter Satellite (XPoSat), in January, carrying instruments built by the Raman Research Institute and the UR Rao Satellite Centre in Bengaluru.

A successful manned mission will set the stage for India’s future space dreams, which include setting up the Bharatiya Antariksha Station by 2035 and sending the first Indian to the moon by 2040. In 2019, then ISRO Chief K Sivan had announced the plan to deploy India’s own space station five to seven years after the completion of the Gaganyaan project. India will not join the International Space Station programme, he had said. “Having a vibrant human spaceflight programme can be leveraged as a potent foreign policy tool,” says the ISRO website. Apart from Gaganyaan, ISRO has many missions lined up for the next three years, including NISAR, a joint project with NASA to launch a dual-frequency synthetic aperture radar satellite for remote sensing, and Mangalyaan-2. India also wants to send a mission to the moon once again to bring lunar soil to Earth. Meanwhile, ISRO is working on developing a next-generation launch vehicle to deploy humans to the moon and to the space station in future.

Amid the excitement around Gaganyaan, Modi, on February 28, laid the foundation stone for ISRO’s second spaceport at Kulasekarapattinam in Tamil Nadu, followed by a sounding rocket launch from there. The spaceport will be ready in two years to launch small satellites, the ISRO chairman has said. Kulasekarapattinam is closer to the Equator than Sriharikota and has the added advantage that rockets can be launched directly south over the Indian Ocean instead of taking a diversion around Sri Lanka, thus saving fuel.

Ajit KrishnanAngad PratapastronautsDestination MoonMission GaganyaanPrasanth Balakrishnan NairRussiaShubhanshu Shuklatraining